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Wednesday, 8 July 2015

The Slow Death of Hope for Creation

My husband works at a homeless shelter in downtown Toronto. He says that
one of the hardest things that the staff struggle with, and often burn out
from, is the slow death of hope for the people they work with. It’s easier to
be cynical than to keep hoping, to celebrate a step forward when you know that
more than likely the person will step back, or fall down again. Sometimes there
are beautiful ‘success’ stories, as indeed the organization provides resources
to help people in the face of material poverty. But it’s also a success story
to simply sit with someone, every day, for years, through their struggles,
through their failings. We’re not called to love people into being better – we
are just called to love them, as Christ loves us, despite our constant failings,
thorough brokenness, and inability to save ourselves.

I have been experiencing the slow death of hope for the beauty of creation.
More specifically, about people’s apparent lack of interest in the state of
creation, and even more, my own inability to do anything. I’m not a fan of fear
statistics about rising sea levels, extinction rates, or other doomsday
predictions. These inspire guilt, and often despair, as it seems things are too
far out of control. A much better motivator that is more rooted in scripture is
that we are called to care for creation because we love it. As we love others
despite their, and our own, perpetual brokenness so we must look at our broken
earth. It is broken at our own hands, and we are to continue loving it, and
those that perpetuate its brokenness.

As much as a natural scene (I am a fan of rivers and lakes, personally)
inspires awe and wonder they are now often accompanied with the lamenting
thought, “what have we done?” This is
how God made the world, and look at what we have done to it. Even more, we hardly
care. This is by no means intended to inspire guilt, as I am in that place too
often. Another large part of my loss of hope is the fact that I can hardly do
anything, even if I knew what to do.

Reducing my meat consumption in response to the immense toll that the meat
industry takes on the environment means I would have to find protein some other
way. One of the best (?) ways to do this is through soybean products, which as
a crop are responsible for a significant deforestation and farmer displacement.

As much as I might ride my bicycle instead of driving a car, there are
industries and systems in place that pour out pollutants that operate on a
scale that hardly seems accessible to me.

I have bought used jewelry to avoid mining and labour issues, but have bought
far more electronics that have microchips and materials that play into these
same problems – blood diamonds are
trendy, used laptops are not.

Even more, many of these alternative options are only available to me by being
middle class, having the time and resources to research and afford these
options. Buying locally and ethically, taking the time to compost, recycle, garden,
bike, researching what you buy from where, are acts of a certain privilege. Even
though environmental concerns disproportionately impact those in poverty, often
those who are bound by poverty have more immediate concerns about their health
and family, than where their waste might go.One of the hardest parts about caring for creation is to continue to love the broken church that has largely failed to respond to the groaning of the earth, and to accept grace for myself in this failure as well. We can lament this, but we don’t have to stay there. The type of hope we have is not in our power to reduce carbon emissions.
We are called to love and care for the earth – but how? We are called to love
others – but they fail, they let us down, they relapse, as do we in response to
others’ (and God’s) love for us. The love that Christ demonstrates is a
suffering love.[1]

In the face of melting ice caps, of knowing your reusable coffee mugs will also
sit in a landfill, of the immense consumption and waste of North American
culture, we are called to love the earth. Redemption and hope in our own life
is not out of the question, as much has been and will continue to be done to
foster stewardship of the earth. But we
don’t love creation in order to fix it.

[1] More on this idea: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/02/love-unleashed-through-suffering